Jordan B Peterson has no truck with “white privilege”, “cultural appropriation” and a range of other ideas associated with social justice movements.
Photograph: Carlos Osorio/Toronto Star/Getty Images

The Canadian clinical psychologist Jordan B Peterson has, in recent years, become an internet celebrity, producing a slew of videos and interviews on all manner of political and social topics. He is acerbic, combative and openly contemptuous of his opponents, particularly Marxists and “Postmodernists”, for whom he harbours a special animus. He is an enthusiastic and prolific culture warrior, who has no truck with “white privilege”, “cultural appropriation” and a range of other ideas associated with social justice movements. His reluctance to call transgender people by their preferred pronouns (unless they ask him to) has earned him a reputation as a transphobe, and while his views have marginalised him within the academic community, they have bolstered his reputation in conservative circles.

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His academic work includes many papers in which he seeks to understand political and religious belief in terms of the so-called “big five” personality traits – openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. His work on the psychology of political correctness has raised eyebrows, given his recent proposal to purge “corrupt” academic departments of courses and teachers he deems infected by this pathology.

In an emailed rebuttal to a journalist who termed him a figure of the “far right”, he described his own politics as those of a “classic British liberal … temperamentally I am high on openness which tilts me to the left, although I am also conscientious which tilts me to the right. Philosophically I am an individualist, not a collectivist of the right or the left. Metaphysically I am an American pragmatist who has been strongly influenced by the psychoanalytic and clinical thinking of Freud and Jung.”

This response captures much of what, for good and ill, informs 12 Rules for Life, his long and often peculiar foray into the self-help genre. It is a book that combines sensible advice gleaned from his clinical practice with inspirational anecdotes from his personal life, accounts of his academic work in the field of psychology and a lot of intellectual history of the “great books” variety, which he interprets in highly tendentious ways.

His publisher has preferred to gloss over his reputation as an internet controversialist, characterising him tactfully as a “modern day truth teller” and furnishing him with a page-long biography that begins:

Jordan B Peterson, raised and toughened in the frigid wastelands of Northern Alberta, has flown a hammerhead roll in a carbon fibre stunt plane, piloted a mahogany racing sailboat around Alcatraz Island, explored an Arizona meteorite crater with a group of astronauts, built a Native American longhouse on the upper floor of his Toronto home, and been inducted into the coastal Pacific Kwakwaka’wakw tribe.

Once the cloud of testosterone has cleared (leaving behind the lingering curiosity as to why, exactly, one would want a longhouse upstairs), the reader discovers that each of Peterson’s 12 rules is explained in an essay delivered in a baroque style that combines pull-your-socks-up scolding with footnoted references to academic papers and Blavatskyesque metaphysical flights. He likes to capitalise the word “Being” and also to talk about “fundamental, biological and non-arbitrary emergent truth”. Within a page, we are told that “expedience is cowardly, and shallow, and wrong” and “meaning is what emerges beautifully and profoundly like a newly formed rosebud opening itself out of nothingness into the light of sun and God”. The effect is bizarre, like being shouted at by a rugby coach in a sarong.

Peterson styles himself as a prolific culture warrior who has no truck with social justice movements. Photograph: Michael Nigro/Pacific/BarcroftImages

Peterson’s stern preceptor persona probably works well in a clinical setting, where he presumably encounters damaged people in need of an authority figure who can provide an external source of order and stability. Most of his rules are to do with personal responsibility, and making the kind of life choices that will allow a person to function efficiently in the world. We should choose our friends wisely, lovingly discipline our children, respect the wisdom of tradition and so on. He takes the view that one should build outwards from small-scale personal choices towards larger social and political questions. “Don’t blame capitalism, the radical left, or the iniquity of your enemies. Don’t reorganise the state until you have ordered your own experience. Have some humility. If you cannot bring peace to your own household, how dare you try to rule a city?”

Unfortunately, he is not a man who will be content with a heuristic when he thinks there’s a fundamental truth to be had. As a good student of Jung, he likes an archetype, ideally one he can ground in biology. Relativise that, postmodernists! When he wants to talk about duality, he finds it in “the structure of the brain at a gross morphological level”. Gender is absolutely not fluid. “Male and female and parent and child are categories for us – natural categories, deeply embedded in our perceptual, emotional and motivational structures.”

The big duality in 12 Rules for Life is the opposition of order and chaos. The point of the rules is, as the subtitle states, to provide “an antidote to chaos”. The maintenance of order is at the core of Peterson’s world view. Order is truth. It is singular and masculine. Chaos is “the eternal feminine”, a misty Jungian formulation that puts the author in the invidious position of promoting a how-to manual on suppressing the feminine principle. He fudges this by talking about yin and yang, and “straddling dualities”, but if chaos is indeed the “possibility, growth and adventure” towards which he occasionally remembers to genuflect, it’s clear that he is mainly preoccupied with keeping it at bay.

Chaos is the realm of lies, of the language of persuasion, of Jacques Derrida and ethnic studies and boys who think they’re girls. These things are bad enough in themselves, but they are chiefly perfidious because they form a sort of gateway drug to totalitarianism. In a podcast interview he explains:

He does not like to be asked if he believes in God, complaining that the question is intended to 'box him in'

It’s not an easy thing to live in a truthful manner, but the alternative is hell … I learned a lot about the importance of spoken truth as the countervailing force against tyranny and authoritarianism. It isn’t an alternative political structure that’s the countervailing force, it’s spoken truth that’s the countervailing force. Why would I put my job on the line to have an opinion about compelled pronouns? Because the ability to speak your truth is the bulwark against hell.

This religious language is not metaphorical. Peterson does not like to be asked if he believes in God, complaining to an interviewer that the question is intended to “box him in”, but 12 Rules for Life is saturated with Christian theology. Many pages are devoted to biblical exegesis, and his thoughts about lies lead him first to Goebbels and the “big lie” of propaganda, then to the “father of lies” – not Derrida, but the devil. When thinking about the Columbine school shootings, he is moved to wonder whether Eric Harris was not, in fact, an incarnation of Satan.

What makes this book so irritating is Peterson’s failure to follow many of the rules he sets out with such sententiousness. He does not “assume that the person he is listening to might know something he doesn’t”. He is far from “precise in his speech”, allowing his own foundational concepts (like “being” and “chaos”) to slide around until they lose any clear meaning. He is happy to dish out a stern injunction against straw-manning, but his “Postmodernists” and Marxists are the flimsiest of scarecrows, so his chest-thumping intellectual victories seem hollow. He appears sincere, and in some ways admirable in his fierce desire for truth, but he is much less far along his journey than he thinks, and one ends his oppressive, hectoring book relieved to be free of him.

• 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos is published by Allen Lane. To order a copy for £17 (RRP £20) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.